Oct. 15 - Instructional Strategies

Teachers need to make their classroom as the home field advantage.  When students enter the classroom, they need to feel like they are getting the home field advantage.  Here is where I can create and be the most successful.

Cummins

• 4 stages of Acquisition
• preproduction (the silent period) 6 mos to a year
• Early production - sentences are very simple, not complete
• Speech emergent - they will get most sentences right
• Intermediate Fluency

Sheltered English

• Hand on
• visual cooperative learning
• guarded vocabular - protect the number of new vocabulary words that are introduced, and repeat them.

I hear I forget.

I see and I remember.

I do and I understand.

Learning Pyramid - average  retention rates

Lecture 5%

Reading 10%

Audio Visual 20%

Demonstration 30%

Discussion Group 50%

Practice by doing 75%

Teach Others/Immediate Use of Learning 95%

Cooperative Learning

• keep groups small
• needs to be done with careful planning
• is not easy to jump into

With Cooperative Learning research shows that you will have:

• higher achievement
• more time on task
• improved higher level thinking skills
• greater retention
• improved skills for working with others

Great example of solving a problem using cooperative learning and going down the learning pyramid.

Setting up a Coop Lesson - 6 Key Concepts

1. Teams 
1. keep them small
2. developmentally appropriate
3. heterogeneous, homogeneous, random
4. assigned by teacher
5. You need to do bonding activities to get those students to want to help each other out
2. Will
1. Students must have the will to cooperate
2. Team building and class building activities
3. Team and class recognition systems
3. Management
1. Quiet signal
2. Assigning roles
3. Team questions
4. Skills
1. Listening
2. Conflict resolution
3. Tutoring skills
5. Basic Principals
1. positive interdependence - a gain for one is a gain for another
2. individual accountability - individual performance is required
3. equal participation - equal participation is planned
4. simultaneous interaction - a greater percentage of students are overtly active at once
6. Coop Strategies
1. Structure how students interact with each other
2. have the 4 basic principals built in

5 reason to do team building

1. Creates teams in which everyone achieves
2. promotes real work team work
3. created the will and the skill to cooperate
4. builds positive student relations
5. creates a positive classroom climate

Preparing the students 

1. explain directions
2. offer suggestions
3. help each other without interfering
4. encourage each other
5. paraphrase
6. request a justification 
7. extend each others utterances
8. express emotion
9. resolve conflict
10. criticize other w/out giving offense

Cooperative learning rules groups

1. you are responsible for your own behavior
2. you must be willing to help anyone who asks
3. you may not ask the teacher for help unless everyone in the group has the same question